When the final numbers are in, he probably will have spent more than $600,000 to change Lackawanna County’s government to an executive-council form, but he still believes he did it for all the right reasons.

He won’t rule out trying to replace the commissioner form again. He firmly believes change would limit the chances of the repeated corruption the region is known for outside the area.

“I’m not ruling any political future out,” Mr. Volpe said.

Except for one. He absolutely will not run for commissioner next year.

“To me, it would be hypocritical to run against a form of government — after I did everything financially and otherwise in my power to change it — and then say, ‘Well, I’m going to run for commissioner right now. I don’t think that works,” he said.

“I will never do business with the county again, and I don’t care about these guys (Commissioners Corey O’Brien and Jim Wansacz) or the form of government. Just based on we don’t need to. Flat out, I’m not, because I never want that to be an issue,” he said.

He thinks he’s figured out why his effort failed — him.

Last year, voters approved a government study commission because he was out front selling the idea in television commercials.

“I looked into the camera and people believed me and I explained ... what was being done and why it needed to be done,” he said,. “I then explained what a vote for the commission would do. I even explained, as you’ll recall, why they had to vote for the FixIt ticket, that there would be no change (otherwise). ... My feeling is that I looked into the camera and people believed me, and they saw what I believe comes out, which is conviction and integrity, and that I’m really doing it for the right reasons.”

This year, he decided against injecting himself into TV commercials.

“I felt like I swore an oath and I was elected to an office, which I faithfully did,” he said. “ I was the chairman of that government commission and I didn’t want to make it about me. I tried to make it be on the issues. We thought ... transparency and corruption and the taxation were the issues. As it turned out, as we now know in hindsight, they were not the issues.”

Mr. Volpe said the opposition confused voters — 17 elected officials in the new government versus 11 now and a purported $1.1 million more in costs — and he failed to counter.

“This time, they defined me — buying government, bigger government,” he said. “Clearly, people were unwilling to believe at this point that somebody would have done this for the right reasons and spent all that money and done it without expectation of anything in return. ... What I should have done is look in the camera and said, ‘They say it’s bigger government, here’s why it’s not,’ and run those (commercials). And then the next one would have been, ‘They say it’s more expensive, here’s why it’s not.’ ... And then at the end, it would have been, ‘They tried to make this about Chuck Volpe, it’s not about me, it’s about my granddaughter, my grandchildren and your kid who have to leave this area because they don’t have opportunity.’ ”

With enough of that advertising, he thinks change would have won.

Maybe, but while more TV visibility by Mr. Volpe might have helped, his bigger mistake was probably a shortage of grass-roots organizing and relying too much on TV.

Lacking Mr. Volpe’s money, the opposition convinced a dozen or so local governments to publicly oppose the plan, said their leader, Mayfield Mayor Alexander Chelik. Closer to the election, they mailed to voters 25,000 letters signed by those government leaders urging a no vote.

Study commission members never met with local officials or got out to sell the plan.

Mr. Chelik also argues the commission’s product was faulty because it was born out of a preconceived notion rather than a real study. For example, he points to the surprise revival of a prothonotary’s office that voters did away with in the 1970s and taxation limits, which weren’t in the commission’s draft report, but showed up in its final draft.

“They had no idea what they were doing” because of the single-minded focus on change, Mr. Chelik said. “They concentrated on (corruption), but they did not tell the people what were the specifics of the new form of government. We tried to bring out some of the specifics of their plan. ... They talked about issues that were cerebral.

“Everybody is in favor of getting rid of corruption in government. Everybody’s in favor of getting rid of cronyism in government. But they didn’t tell people how their plan would get rid of that. ... I thought we were more truthful with the people all along. We didn’t treat the voters as being stupid.”

We welcome user discussion on our site, under the following guidelines:

To comment you must first create a profile and sign-in with a verified DISQUS account or social network ID. Sign up here.

Comments in violation of the rules will be denied, and repeat violators will be banned. Please help police the community by flagging offensive comments for our moderators to review. By posting a comment, you agree to our full terms and conditions. Click here to read terms and conditions.